God with a Human Face (Original Jesus, Chapter 7)

^{The closer we get to the original Jesus - to the storytelling Jesus, the healing Jesus, the welcoming Jesus, the Jesus who declared God’s judgment on those who rejected the way of peace and justice... the closer we are to recognizing the face of the living God.
(Original Jesus, 83)}

What do we mean when we say "Jesus is God"? Too often I fear this is a matter of detached theology, simply affirming that Jesus is the incarnation of the God of the universe. You know, "that's just what we Christians are supposed to believe. So drop it already."

But when it comes to God, are we all on the same page for the above statement to make sense? Do we really know enough about God to know what a personal visit from him might look like? In our culture today this is an important question. Do we really want to attach Jesus to most popular conceptions of God? Many in our world imagine a detached and distant creator -- up there somewhere. Do we imagine Jesus to be that god? (or do we prefer to pick the god of New Age or Americanism or something else?)

Our confusion on this point is precisely why we needed Jesus. Not just to set our ideas straight. But to introduce us to something of what God is like. As Wright put it, "We don't know, off the top of our heads, exactly who God is; but we can discover him by looking at Jesus." (p.79).

The God Jesus knew (as a first century Jew steeped in the Old Testament) is both the Almighty Creator and the Caring Father who hears and is willing to roll up his sleeves and sort out things himself; a God involved in the world and invested in turning things around.

Jews actually did have an idea of what it might look like for this God to visit, though Jesus wasn't quite what they had in mind. They had pictures like these: Lady Wisdom calling out in the streets (in Proverbs); the Law as the means through which God would personally gather and guide His people; and the Temple itself as the place where the presence of God dwelt.

Enter Jesus. He called out and taught as if he were that Wisdom. As if he were the Law and Lawgiver sent to gather and guide. As if he were Temple, housing the living presence of God himself.

And so in Jesus, we see what this God, the involved God of sovereign love, might look like if he were to become human. The closer we get to understanding the "original" Jesus (the real, in-your-face Kingdom-of-God Jesus), the closer we are to seeing the face of the Living God.

This Jesus cannot be contained. He can't be treated as a mere signpost to God, or a supporter of our agendas (however well-intentioned or religious or "Christian"). This Jesus upsets our ideas about God, our religion.

This Jesus lived among God’s people telling stories about the kingdom of God, healing the sick and confronting the powerful. He died under the weight of the world’s pain, and rose again having defeated death.

Fast forward to today: If the living God was uniquely and personally present in Jesus... so what? What does it mean for us?

Ultimately this question brings us to a journey. Not just a personal, more-or-less self-centered spiritual quest. As Paul reminds us: "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ." (2 Corinthians 5:19 NIV) This journey begins by recognizing the love of God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth but continues as we join in God's work of healing the world.

Biblical Text: Philippians 2:1-11

Embedded Questions:

• Do we know enough about God to answer the question ‘Is Jesus God’?
• Can we fit Jesus into our God picture?
• Is it true that the living God was uniquely and personally present in Jesus?
• What might it look like today if people were captivated by the Spirit of this (the original) Jesus?

Resurrection (Original Jesus: Chapter 6)

When people died they stayed dead, in first-century Palestine just as much as in the technological twentieth century. Jesus' followers weren't expecting him to die in the first place; when he did, they certainly weren't expecting him to rise again. Yet they said, loud and clear, that that was what had happened.
Original Jesus, 72

Why did Christianity ever get going anyway? There were other Jewish would-be messiahs and revolutionaries within a hundred years of Jesus’ life (Judas the Galilean and Simeon ben-Kosiba, among others). A leader would gain a following, people would proclaim him to be Messiah, and then he would be hunted down and killed by the occupying forces. Every time, the movement would die with the leader.

But the Jesus movement didn’t die with the crucifixion of Jesus. His followers kept following him. They didn’t even visit his grave to pray and grieve (with the exception of that first Sunday), as would be custom in Jewish culture.

Rather than going back to their old lives or looking for a new Messiah (perhaps in Jesus’ brother James?), Jesus’ followers were emphatic that Jesus was the Messiah. Three days after his execution and burial, they said, Jesus was raised to bodily life again, leaving an empty tomb behind him. The current Jewish understanding of a final resurrection at the end of the age left little room for a single person coming back to life in the middle of history. The last thing they would have expected was for Jesus to be resurrected.

The accounts we have are "mostly quite breathless and artless" (p. 72), more like eye witness sketches than carefully planned stories. They knew that it had happened, and that it would change everything. The resurrection meant that the kingdom of God had come to birth, that the real return from exile had happened, and that evil had been defeated. They, and others, had to go on taking Jesus seriously. The victory that Jesus had won over evil and death (which is the good news, the gospel) must be taken to the ends of the earth.

Biblical Text: Luke 23:33-38, 44-56; 24:1-12

Embedded Questions:

• After Jesus’ execution, why didn’t Jesus’ followers give up or find a new messiah?
• Why did they think he was the Messiah after all?
• Why didn’t the story end when Jesus was crucified?

Jesus vs. Temple (The Original Jesus: Chapter 5)

What was Jesus’ revolution all about? At its heart, he was remaking the people of God around himself, and telling everybody that they were freely welcome in it.
(Original Jesus, 60)

First century Jerusalem was, more or less, a city built around a temple. This structure was of special significance to the Jewish people– it was the place where God chose to meet with his people. It was considered to be the center of the city, the center of worship, even the center of the cosmos.

Temple was also at the center of Jewish expectancy when it came to the coming King of the line of David -- the Messiah, the anointed one. This king (it was believed) would have to go to Jerusalem to be crowned and to cleanse the Temple.

The turning point for Jesus' ministry came at Caesarea Philippi (some one hundred miles north of the Temple), where Simon Peter proclaimed: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (Matthew 16:16 ESV) Jesus is Messiah, the King they were waiting for. But what would this mean for his followers?

From that point on, what had been a Galilean movement shifted its focus to Jerusalem. And increasingly Jesus found himself at odds with the Temple itself. In offering the forgiveness of sins right on the spot, Jesus was claiming to do and be exactly what the temple was and did. Then, in an acted parable symbolizing judgment, Jesus actually cleansed the temple (see Mark 11:15-18). He overturned moneychanger’s tables and drove away people selling sacrificial animals, essentially preventing Temple from functioning.

Just a few days later, Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover– a meal to remember how God liberated the Jews from Egypt. Jesus brought to this meal new direction and significance: Real liberation was about to happen. All that the temple stood for would be summed up in Jesus’ death on the cross, through which evil would be exhausted and "the shameless, reckless love of God would come running down the road to embrace the whole world."(p. 65)

Biblical Text: Mark 11:15-18; Isaiah 53:3-9

Embedded Questions:

• Why was the Temple considered to be the center of the cosmos?
• In what ways was Jesus at odds with the Temple?
• What does Wright mean by "acted parable"? What was Jesus really up to when he cleansed the Temple?
• What does all this have to do with us today?
  

Revolutionary Rally (The Original Jesus: Chapter 4)

Jesus was calling and challenging his contemporaries to be the people of God in a radically new way. He solemnly announced God's blessings -- but he blessed all the wrong people.
(Original Jesus, 51)

The popular picture of the Sermon on the Mount today is of rolling hills and peaceful countryside. A calm Jesus delivers a flowery speech about being nice to each other, offering a quietly romantic view of religious life. But in the first century it looked more like a young leader rallying support for a new revolutionary movement.

At the time of Jesus, the hills above the sea of Galilee were a popular hangout for holy revolutionaries, who sought to gain a following. Similarly, Jesus went to the hills to commission his disciples (Mark 3:13-19) and deliver the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-7). But his was a revolution unlike all the rest. It was a revolution of heart, calling for a radically different approach to life. Jesus tapped into Israel’s call to be the people through whom God would put the world right, calling all who would listen to follow him and embrace God’s agenda for them to be Israel. He was calling his original hearers, as he is calling us today, to believe that God is God, and let that turn their (and our) priorities upside down.

Jesus called them to follow him and his teachings, which is the only way to build your “house on the rock.” Jesus was declaring himself to be the real thing to which the temple had been pointing all along. Here we are called to take a hard, fresh look at God’s call to serve him in the world.

Biblical Text: Matthew 4:23, 25; 5:1-16, 38-45

Embedded Questions:

• Why did Jesus go up there (the mountains/where revolutionaries went to start rebellions) to instruct his followers?
• Why was there a “chosen people” (Israel)?
• What is the big deal about Israel in God’s plan?

Who's invited to the kingdom party? (Original Jesus: Chapter 3)

Jesus was being heavily criticized by the guardians of the ancestral traditions because he was celebrating the kingdom, not with the righteous and the religious elite, but with all and sundry - with the riff-raff, the nogoods, the down-and-outs. (Original Jesus, 41)

Today we see a sharp distinction between stories and reality. While to us, stories are illustrations for kids, first century Jews understood stories to be a way of getting to grips with reality. Jesus himself communicated through parables, through stories. Our need, then, is to make the historical effort to get back inside the minds of the original audience. One of Jesus’ most well known stories is the Parable of the Running Father found in Luke 15 (better known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son).

To Israel this story was much more shocking than we realize: A dignified father who runs? A disgraced prodigal comes home? Unheard of! Often we see this story in general terms as about God’s love for us, his prodigal children. But to Jesus’ first century Jewish audience, this was a story filled with much deeper significance: This was the story of Israel going into exile, and then at last coming back again! Further, the story resembles the way that Jesus had been throwing his dignity aside to celebrate the kingdom with the no-good “sinners.” He was bringing the kingdom of God, the real homecoming. Israel is being restored after exile.

The elder brother represents for the people who didn’t buy Jesus’ version of the kingdom-story, who wanted to hang on to their dignity. Jesus invited everyone– the riff-raff prodigals and the dignified grumblers– to the kingdom party. God’s new rule was going to turn the world upside down.

Biblical Text: Luke 15:1-2, 11-32

Embedded Questions:

• Why did Jesus speak in parables?
• What’s going to happen next in the story?
• What is the reason for the party? Who is invited?
• Who is cast in the roles of the younger brother, and the older brother (in original setting)?

Enter John the Plunger (Original Jesus: Chapter 2)

"Jesus believed that in the end he, himself, would go down, alone, to the lowest point of human experience. Somehow, strangely, through that act God would would defeat evil."
(Original Jesus, 32)

The wilderness– just the place a first century Jew might expect things to happen. Here, the Jordan Valley (literally the lowest point on earth), was a place riddled with meaning and significance. It brought to mind the Exodus event, when God led them out of Egypt and into the land he had promised to their ancestor Abraham. The crossing of the Jordan river (described in Joshua 3-4) symbolized for Israel new starts, new beginnings. From the Hebrew prophets, they understood that it would be in the wilderness that “God and Israel get it together again” (p. 25; see also Hosea 2:14; Isaiah 40:3-5, 9).

Things weren’t the way they were supposed to be for Israel. They were living under the rule of pagan Romans who were contaminating their culture. They were over-taxed, and sliding deep into debt. Many groups led by would-be prophets and kings arose, all with vision for Israel’s God himself to set them free and bring in the time of peace and justice. These leaders and their movements usually didn’t last long. The Essenes at Qumran were similarly looking for God to act in history to defeat the Romans and to establish the true people of God.

Then came John into the wilderness, plunging people into the Jordan river. Here he was symbolically re-enacting what happened when the children of Israel came through the River Jordan and into the promised land. This was an exodus symbol, implying that God was coming back to Israel. John saw himself as preparing the way for that coming, as he pointed the movement to its new leader: Jesus.

Jesus came telling people that the kingdom of God was happening now, which meant justice, hope and the destruction of evil. But how? In Jesus' version of the story, this came in a way that no one expected. Yes, God's kingdom would overturn the power structures of the world (think: Rome), but it would also upset all the misleading expectancies of how this would take place.

Biblical Text: Luke 3:1-3, 15-16; Mark 1:9-15 (also check out Isaiah 40:3-9)

Embedded Questions:

• Why would John the Baptist spend his time in the desert?
• Why was this the lowest point of history (climactic point of history)?
• What was original about Jesus’ version of this message (God acting within time and space on behalf of Israel)?

Jesus: Failed Messiah? (Original Jesus: Chapter 1)

"We know for certain that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. That is one of the most secure facts in the history of the world. But on the other hand, we know that literally thousands of other Jews were crucified within fifty years either side of Jesus. What made Jesus special? Why do people all over the world tell the story of his death, rather than any of the others?"
(Original Jesus, 18)

In Jesus' day, Jerusalem was a hot spot for violence and religious fanaticism. But for the Jewish people, it was also a city of hope and expectation. Here is where King David set up his capitol. Here the prophets tell us that God would reveal himself to save not only Israel but the whole world. Here Jesus came followed by scores of disciples, all hoping that he would bring the rule of God right then and there and liberate them from their oppressors. Here Jesus was arrested and crucified. Just like other failed messiahs.

But what made him different? Why are people still talking about Jesus today? Why is Jesus not just regarded as yet another well-intentioned (but failed) "messiah" crucified under the brutality of Rome?

Something made Jesus much more than another young protester casually liquidated by the occupying forces. Jesus’ followers kept following him, having witnessed something incredible: God raised him from the dead! They came to understand that Jesus’ death meant something– that God through this single action in history had dealt definitively with the problem of human guilt and shame. "This was where the one true God acted to save and heal the whole world." (p. 21)

Biblical Text: Mark 15:25-34

Embedded Questions:

• What made Jesus special?

• Why do people all over the world tell the story of his death rather than all the other martyrs?

• What caused the 12 disciples to give up everything and follow him?

• How can the death of a individual 2,000 years ago, in another culture and in another place, be relevant for me today?